Nuclio real-time functions#

Nuclio is a high-performance “serverless” framework focused on data, I/O, and compute intensive workloads. It is well integrated with popular data science tools, such as Jupyter and Kubeflow; supports a variety of data and streaming sources; and supports execution over CPUs and GPUs.

You can use Nuclio through a fully managed application service (in the cloud or on-prem) in the Iguazio MLOps Platform. MLRun serving utilizes serverless Nuclio functions to create multi-stage real-time pipelines.

The underlying Nuclio serverless engine uses a high-performance parallel processing engine that maximizes the utilization of CPUs and GPUs, supports 13 protocols and invocation methods (for example, HTTP, Cron, Kafka, Kinesis), and includes dynamic auto-scaling for HTTP and streaming. Nuclio and MLRun support the full life cycle, including auto-generation of micro-services, APIs, load-balancing, logging, monitoring, and configuration management—such that developers can focus on code, and deploy to production faster with minimal work.

Nuclio is extremely fast: a single function instance can process hundreds of thousands of HTTP requests or data records per second. To learn more about how Nuclio works, see the Nuclio architecture documentation.

Nuclio is secure: Nuclio is integrated with Kaniko to allow a secure and production-ready way of building Docker images at run time.

Read more in the Nuclio documentation and the open-source MLRun library.

Why another “serverless” project?#

None of the existing cloud and open-source serverless solutions addressed all the desired capabilities of a serverless framework:

  • Real-time processing with minimal CPU/GPU and I/O overhead and maximum parallelism

  • Native integration with a large variety of data sources, triggers, processing models, and ML frameworks

  • Stateful functions with data-path acceleration

  • Simple debugging, regression testing, and multi-versioned CI/CD pipelines

  • Portability across low-power devices, laptops, edge and on-prem clusters, and public clouds

  • Open-source but designed for the enterprise (including logging, monitoring, security, and usability)

Nuclio was created to fulfill these requirements. It was intentionally designed as an extendable open-source framework, using a modular and layered approach that supports constant addition of triggers and data sources, with the hope that many will join the effort of developing new modules, developer tools, and platforms for Nuclio.